Every person has documents that they need access to, so it stands to reason that a business has hundreds. If you and your staff are tired of sifting through dingy file cabinets to find that the document that should be in a certain place, isn’t, considering a document management system may be right for you. Today we will give you five good reasons why moving to document management can be a benefit for your business.
Business use IT more today than ever before, and this has led business owners, CIOs and IT managers to constantly search for ways to deliver organizational profitability through technology. They do this by attempting, sometimes futilely, to pinpoint issues with their overall business strategy and practices while discovering technology solutions that will help mitigate these problems. Typically, if an IT manager speculates that a technology implementation will reduce costs or improve productivity, those solutions find a way to be implemented.
In 2017, when there is more technology to choose from than there are colors in a box of crayons, it’s important to rely on competent and frugal managers to find you the technology that can work to make your business more efficient. Here are three ways businesses that have never relied on automation can leverage it to improve some aspect of their business.
Social Media
Nowadays, having a social media presence is standard operating procedure for businesses. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn can help to boost your business’ traffic, but if you don’t have the resources to continuously keep up with updating social media, there are options out there that will add some degree of automation to your social media initiatives. The application called Hootsuite was created to assist organizations to enhance their social media presence without having to put as much time and effort into their social media marketing. Hootsuite offers a free plan that supports three social media profiles and two campaigns, and it also has affordable paid options that provide organizations with several additional tools.
Paperless Automation
Going paperless can save your business plenty of resources, but sticking with a paperless office strategy is no easy task. Utilizing modern scanning equipment (as opposed to the old one-page-at-a-time flatbed technology), you can process more documents in less time. Using software to organize, share, and distribute scanned documents, both on-premise or in the cloud, can speed up the overhead and save a lot of time in the long run. Equally as important, is to make sure digitized files are backed up automatically, so your data is stored redundantly in case of a disaster.
Point of Sales and E-Commerce
When your organization sets out to sell products, whether you are focusing on sales inside a brick and mortar store on selling to clients on the Internet, it is important that you have a secure and reliable sales interface. Since business often moves faster than people do, having a solution to process payments, and get products to customers, is essential. There is software that delivers automation by linking your organization's storefront to your fulfillment vendors. This automation, integrating the invoicing, shipping, and customer feedback processes into one easy-to-manage solution, provides any product-based organization the tools they need to enhance customer satisfaction, build reliable customer relationships, and provide top notch support.
If your business is searching for solutions to your major business problems, there is a good chance that there is software that has been developed to remedy those issues. Do you already use automated services to help your business be more efficient? Have you considered trying some to further your organization’s goals? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.
Many businesses are searching for ways to go green. Most of the ones that do are trying to cut out their reliance on paper and printing. This is strategic thinking, of course, since the cost of printer toner has skyrocketed over the years. Today the most affordable printer ink on the market still comes in at an astounding $13 per ounce; or, slightly more than Dom Perignon. This is why businesses that are looking to cut costs, as well as embrace environmentally-friendly initiatives, are going paperless.
There’s no denying that digital records have quite a few advantages over paper documentation. Benefits of ‘going paperless’ include simplified search capabilities, more efficient storage, heightened security and automated backup capabilities. There are plenty of sources around the Internet that discuss making the switch to paperless documentation, but to keep your business documents safe, it is better to know what you’re getting into.
Transferring data is nothing new, but the technology used to accomplish it has changed considerably. While the technology once peaked at simply scanning an image of the data into your computer, there is now the capability for scanned media to become a handwriting-interpreting, searchable document. A practical example can be seen in the use of online databases to track one’s genealogy. Handwritten ship manifests, immigration documents, and other handwritten bits of history are now much easier to access and search thanks to advancements in document conversion software.
However, there is wisdom in the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” that can be hard to argue against. On top of that, there are some industries that are held to regulations that require adherence to assorted record storage and disposal requirements. Before you begin the process of converting and destroying any of your records, you need to make sure that you are not beholden to any of these requirements. Again, these requirements are mostly based on your industry, or the industries you serve, but you may consider following the lead of many small and medium-sized businesses and retain your records a little longer than you are required. After all, it is better to be safe than sorry.
Your industry might also impact how your digital copies of your data are handled. Privacy is a major concern, especially in the medical industry and those industries that make a lot of transactions where credit cards are used as payment. These industries need to be sure that they are in accordance with the regulatory compliance standards set forth by HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and PCI DSS, or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, accordingly. These regulations, and others like them, make it crucial for you to ensure that your data meets the compliance standards both before and after it has been transferred to a digital record.
You must also consider what kind of resources you can spare for the involved conversion process to take place. Consider this: if a business averaged 5 customers each day in the 1990s, they would have at least 13,000 paper records to either securely store or mindfully destroy.
However, if you want to digitize your paper records but lack the time and equipment, numerous third-party services exist who would happily take on any document conversion process. Your business’ needs, security requirements, and budgetary constraints will dictate if outsourcing this task is appropriate for your business.
If you’re prepared to go digital from the very start, the organization provided by a document management solution can assist you.
If you’d like to learn more about keeping digital records and utilizing a document management system for your business purposes, reach out to The Connection, Inc at (732) 291-5938.
Paper can be incredibly expensive, especially with the quantity that a normal business goes through every single day. However, not only is it expensive on the monetary side, but also on the environmental side as well. By making some changes around your office, you can be more eco-friendly and budget-friendly by reducing the amount of paper waste your organization suffers from.
The file cabinet. It may be a staple of the office, but boy can they be a pain in the neck. Every file needs to be printed and collated only to be filed in a dingy file cabinet with the off chance that it will ever be needed again. For businesses that have a lot of paper filed away, a document management system can go a long way toward modernizing your organization, and providing a access-controlled database where you can find any file in seconds.
In some situations, competition is good for a business; and, for others, it can be terrible. As marketing, and specifically online marketing becomes more imperative for the success of every organization, all the content that is created for this purpose has to be managed. For this week’s technology term, we take a look at the different kinds of content management services (CMS) and what they do to make managing your organization’s content simpler.
What is a CMS?
A CMS is an application that stores content, provides easy editing options, and third-party integrations to get the most out of your content. It provides a central hub that allows anyone with access the ability to build, alter, and store content. Each type of application needs a strategy. There are two different CMS strategies that you have to be cognizant of:
We’ll look at each strategy and describe why they are useful and how to choose the one right for you.
Web-Based Content Management System (WCMS)
If your organization has rolled out a website, chances are that you had a website creator build it. It uses a WCMS to create and manage all the content found on the website. Since your website is the central hub of your entire web marketing strategy, ensuring that you are getting the features and management capabilities that will allow you to get the most out of your efforts is important to the success of those endeavors. A WCMS provides these opportunities, and more than that, it offers people that don’t have any experience with the creation and management of websites options to do both with no prior training.
With marketing often, a day-by-day process, organizations need to be able to make changes to their websites on the fly. By using a Web-based CMS, you will be able to quickly create, edit, and publish content that is relevant to your current business initiatives while also integrating forms, forums, and even social media in order to get the best degree of customer and prospect engagement.
Some titles include: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
Enterprise Content Management System
Enterprise content management is a bit different, but it does largely the same thing. It provides a construct to manage content in an online environment and gives everyone inside an organization a deep and functional repository of information that’s easy to access and manage. Some of the ways that businesses will use this system include:
To remain competitive in business today, businesses need to have access to information, and control over that information. The enterprise content management system does exactly that. Since management of content is management of data, having a system in place that allows for comprehensive access to all of an organization’s content works to make that business more profitable.
Some titles include: HP Distributed Workflow, IBM ECM, Oracle WebCenter Content.
At The Connection, Inc, we can provide more information about content management systems, and what software titles will work best for your situation. Call us today at (732) 291-5938 to learn more.
Consider for a moment how many documents are floating around your business at any given point. Memos, notes, invoices, receipts, and whatever else you happen to accumulate in the course of business, all floating around the office. This isn’t a great approach, and unfortunately, the classic solution for this, the filing cabinet, isn’t the most effective solution anymore.
However, there are now alternatives to the classic filing cabinet and other now-antiquated document management options that are much better suited to the needs of the modern office. In fact, these solutions are what enable businesses today to effectively go paperless.
As printing has become a more costly endeavor, its associated expenses have begun to absorb a larger piece of a budgetary pie chart. Between the costs of the printers and other hardware components themselves, the materials they use up as they operate, and the costs associated with your staff filing all of this information away, businesses have seen their budgets whittled away. Furthermore, it can be very difficult to locate information that has been filed this way - especially if it was filed incorrectly.
Let’s review some of the solutions that we now have access to, that resolve exactly these pain points.
Document Management
Let’s face facts - one of the biggest weaknesses inherent of hard copies how difficult they can be to find (especially if they’ve been misfiled). However, a document management system makes that much simpler, as digitized copies can be stored in the cloud and searched for. Furthermore, while the reduction of printing costs offers a considerable value to a business, the time saved by this solution assists in making it a worthwhile investment, as all documents are turned into searchable PDF files.
While the initial implementation of a document management system may come at an intimidating cost to some, it quickly proves its worth. This is only made more apparent by the fact that, once the solution is in place, the only costs it creates are the ones needed to support the hosting platform.
Document Digitization
Digitizing documents has been widely adopted in recent years, as it makes it much easier to store and organize them. Not only does this approach make it simpler to store vast quantities of data, it also allows certain documents to be much easier to locate. If a member of your staff ever needs to view a document, all they will need to do is search for the right keywords and there the document will be.
Security
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss how your documents are able to be secured within your document management solution. As it is a cloud-hosted solution, it simply wouldn’t be complete without some kind of access control. Many platforms come with this access control baked-in, some even using biometrics or two-factor authentication. More complete control over your document management system is possible, if you are willing and able to invest in a private cloud database. Once implemented, you and your staff can confidently and securely access any document needed from anywhere that has Internet access.
To learn more about a document management system, or other solutions available to you to assist your business’ operations, reach out to The Connection, Inc by calling (732) 291-5938.
Consultation is something that can save businesses a considerable amount of time and resources. After all, you can’t expect a business professional to know everything there is to know about everything. Professional services, like those of lawyers, financial consultants, accountants, advisers, and marketing specialists, are required by just about all businesses to at least some extent. Suffice to say that each of these specialists has dedicated software and IT solutions that are needed for success.
For decades, companies have been looking for an efficient way to manage their documents. For the longest time, the best way was to fill one side of an office with filing cabinets and file the documents away. With most of the workplace now being run by computers, and with hard costs at an all-time low, companies have begun to file all their new files on computer network.
When looking to cut costs in the workplace, one of the best places to start looking is at your printing costs. While paper documents were once incredibly important for businesses (they still serve a function), no one can deny that they take up a considerable amount of space in the workplace, as well as take up precious assets that could be better spent elsewhere. What’s the best way to minimize the resources you spend on printing?
How many documents does your organization accumulate just by simply staying in business? There’s no doubt that you’re sick of the traditional filing cabinet, which is both hard to move around and a pain to organize. Thankfully, modern technology solutions have afforded businesses just like yours with the ability to host and manage documents in a digital, cloud-based environment.
Cloud-based document management solutions provide your business with a ton of great benefits and opportunities to improve the way your business stores and manages files. Here are some of the most notable strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
Easier to Organize and Access
Storing files in a document management system is much like storing files into folders on your workstation or in-house network. It’s much easier than color-coding with tabbed folders. Just imagine being able to store each of your related files in a cloud-based folder system and always knowing where specific files are located, depending on the type of file you’re looking for. You can save time and energy by making your files easier to find. Furthermore, you can access documents and other important files on any connected devices, allowing for more flexible for your workers.
Easier to Navigate
You’re familiar with how a search bar works in both your web browser or online search engines like Google, but what if we told you that you could add this ease of searching to your file storage? Imagine being able to enter in your search credentials for your physical documents, and you have a great reason to implement a document management system in the cloud. All you need to do is plug in your searches and find the files that you’ve been looking for, and it couldn’t be any easier.
Easier to Preserve
If you were to suffer from a fire in your office, would your paper documents survive the disaster? Our guess is “no,” which leads us to the next big question: how can you properly back up your physical file storage? There isn’t a way to do this without wasting a considerable amount of time and money on making copies of each record your business stores. If they are digital files in a document storage system, you can simply implement a data backup and disaster recovery solution to properly preserve documents in the event of the worst.
The Risk: Data Security
The concept of storing data online or in a network-connected cloud system comes with the added likelihood of a data security risk. What if a hacker infiltrated your company’s network? They would be able to indiscriminately steal your company’s documents or access information that’s not for their eyes in the first place. Therefore, you need to consider security issues a top priority for your organization should you implement a document management system. Furthermore, you need to ensure that your data is properly backed up so that even unexpected incidents don’t sink your productivity.
Is your business ready to get rid of physical file storage and instead focus on a digital documentation system? The Connection, Inc can help. To learn more, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938.
Businesses today want to save money and cut costs whenever possible, and technology has made it much easier to do so. Now, organizations can eliminate unnecessary hardware, clear the office space of file storage systems, and even eliminate clutter associated with paper documents.
The Benefits of Going Paperless
Your business can benefit greatly from eliminating paper consumption. The following are potential gains that will improve your business’s operations and bottom line.
How it Helps the Environment
According to PaperlessProductivity, one tree produces, on average, 17 reams of paper. This same tree takes at least 100 years to grow. If you consider how much paper your business uses every day, and then multiply that for every business in the world, chances are that you’ll come up with a number that well exceeds the amount of paper that a single tree can provide. That’s not to mention other users of paper products, like universities, individual consumers, government agencies, and so on. Just think - it takes over 100 years to replace what modern businesses use for paper documents every day.
How We Can Help
If your business wants the opportunity to drastically eliminate paper waste and printing costs, The Connection, Inc can help. We can equip your business with an electronic record storage system that’s designed to store your paper documents in a secure, compliant digital space. This helps to keep your documents safe and sound, while making them easy to find when they’re needed.
Plus, if you’re still (somehow) attached to your fax machine, we can help your business implement a fax server that can essentially transform your business’s faxes into emails that hit your inbox. To learn more, give us a call at (732) 291-5938.
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